Last night I started the dough for panettone. This morning I mixed the dough and set it to rise, and that’s when the trouble started.

An hour before they went into the oven, Gary had plans. “Bring your breakfast and I will hold things up. You don’t even have to touch it. Just say yes or no,” he said.

My husband was determined this past summer to empty our attic, the spaces north and south behind the knee wall. He was entirely successful. The spaces are empty, the roof only barely leaking, and most of the contents given away. Most.

What is left? A stack of “old” good stuff for our son to sell on Ebay and a dozen or so cardboard bankers boxes with “school stuff” I will never use again. There was also a fair-sized cardboard box with rolls of plans and prints of plans and my original plans drawn on translucent paper. There had been another box of these, or perhaps two boxes. I thought I’d rescued all the architectural plans I needed or wanted to keep, but then he unrolled plans for a house I’d forgotten I designed. I remembered it only vaguely from those years I was designing additions to coastal dwellings and entire houses.

There were many more than I recalled: homes and home additions in Gearhart, Little Beach, Tolovana Park, Cannon Beach, Arch Cape, and Falcon Cove. This began in 1983 when I was a new mother with preschool children when our tenant asked if I could make an architectural model. I said, Of course, though I had never done anything of the sort before. My model was the wrong scale and clumsy, but it satisfied the homeowner who was leery of a roofline redesigned to meet a local covenant. She was pleased enough to ask me to design the interior, with the architect’s blessing. He was glad to be shut of this difficult client.

That first project led to work for several homeowners, architects, contractors, and myself too over the next ten or twelve years. I designed and supervised the building of my brother’s home and my mother’s. Neither paid me, and I missed work to complete them, but sacrifice is expected of daughters. I tiled the entry, kitchen backsplash, and the tub surround, floor and wall of Mom’s house. I had to quit my job to get it all done, but she was hysterical most of that time. The contractor went far, far over budget. (It would be years before I understood how little that contractor cared about honest billing.)

The houses I am most fond of were the Buckley House in Tolovana Park and my mother’s house on Jefferson Street in the Presidential Streets of Cannon Beach. I have not passed any of these houses other than my mother’s, which is painful since the new owners remodeled all the charm out of it. I loved that house, and I cannot bear to look at how they ruined it. Mom always promised to leave it to me, but she sold it instead because she liked having cash. It is a sad memory. Perhaps that was what my mother meant when she told me the day she died that she had been cruel to me?

I stopped drawing plans once I was a full time teacher, which paid less, but gave me a steady income and work I enjoyed a great deal. I always thought I would design one more home, from scratch and just for Gary and me, but alas.

In any event, I had forgotten how many projects I completed. The one I live in is good and well, though I find that I changed it from my drawings as we built. The plans tell an interesting story and there a great deal more, what we refer to in the family as “The Big Mess.” That is no fun at all, still a mess in our minds.

The attic is no longer any sort of mess. The atrium, where Gary staged his sorting of attic stuff, is also no longer any sort of mess either with just the two neat stacks destined to leave us permanently. In the house, there are still four original Thonet bentwood chairs labeled 1907, purchased in 1968, when I was in high school. They want recaning and free to a new home. Anyone?

Today, I have begun National Novel Writing Month with 1404 words (so far), somewhat under my goal. And I am supposed to complete knitting the first sleeve for Ruby’s birthday sweater. And really, I would like to curl up with hot chocolate and a slice of panettone.

I made two loaves in pans I had, not proper panettone paper pans, and substituted regular for instant yeast and other things. It was still wonderful!